


Pay Me What Thou Owest

by luminousAreWe (infinitelystrangemachine)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bittersweet, Chases, Dreamsharing, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Kissing, Love/Hate, Plans For The Future, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-25 02:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14967026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitelystrangemachine/pseuds/luminousAreWe
Summary: Who could mistake a seat of flowers for an obsidian throne? Ben could, of course.This doomed future of theirs is becoming very distracting.





	Pay Me What Thou Owest

**Author's Note:**

> "[Prosthetic Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hneF9Iu71g)" - Typhoon  
> "[Devils Don't Fly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iip1cLoNMd4)" - Natalia Kills

For the hundredth time, Kylo coaxes her down to him and kisses her.

 

Fireworks? Planets knocked out of orbit? Not really. Like any one of countless kisses on any given HoloDrama - not that she, you know,  _watches_  any - it's just sort of there. Expected. Kylo changes a subtle angle and -  _ah_  - their lips slot softly together. All thoughts of overpainted HoloDramas promptly fizzle to nothing.

 

Rey's pretty sure it's the hundredth time. But it could also be the two-hundredth, or the two-thousandth, for all she knows. Like she  _cares_.

 

There's his hand at the back of her neck, thick fingers caressing the knot of stress and muscle and bone above the first notch of her spine, like always. There's her loose hair falling in a hesitant curtain around them both, shielding their faces from the light. She keeps her eyes shut tight.

 

Then his lips part just the tiniest bit under hers. A blind glimpse of wetness, the smallest breath. Rey opens her mouth against his to swallow him whole.

 

No one will ever know.

 

* * *

 

_Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong._

 

Weathered stone under her head. The smell of grease trying to force a sneeze. Aches in all her joints blooming back to life. Just like in her dream, Rey keeps her eyes shut tight. Just like always, she convinces herself that she had just snarked those words to  _herself_ , and that the elusive ghost of Luke Skywalker doesn't somehow know that she's borderline macked his nephew a hundred, two-hundred, or two-thousand times since his untimely death.

 

Rey opens her eyes. She's alone.

 

It's just her usual iron cocoon, already erasing the touch of unfamiliar flowers from her skin. Sunlight filtering in through a high strip of window, burning red with rust instead of soft and clear. A pang of longing grips her, and she's eight years old, watching an Uthuthma throat bob, stray trickles of water from his canteen dribbling into the sand. If she were only a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, she could've hauled enough scrap to get her canteen filled, too -

 

Her mouth tastes like dust. Somewhere far away, and yet in a spot just behind her right temple, something stirs as though disturbed.

 

The foreign thought forms. Swirls. So sluggish, so sleepy, Rey only lies there frozen, caught fast between the touch of steel and the touch of grass.

 

The thought pulls up short, as though it's run up against some conundrum. It's odd to Rey, feeling it writhe there within the borders of her consciousness but also utterly out of her control, slipping out of her grasp like a squirming lothcat.

 

The thought warms. Tired. Curious.  _Fond_.

 

_"Scavenger."_

 

Ah. Blast.

 

That... wasn't her. And it sure wasn't crotchety enough for Luke, either.

 

Rey's not fast enough. She's never fast enough. She's barely sat bolt upright by the time the onlooker behind her right temple snaps fully awake, rears back, sharpens in  _recognition_  -

 

 _"Fine, then."_  The voice is all weariness now, edges sharp with petulance. This is a trail worn a thousand times over, one he can never change. An infinite loop of halfhearted attempts. _"Keep running."_

 

 "Keep  _losing_." She is already on her feet, she is already snatching up her staff. The latent power she'd built into its core stirs at her touch, but still - frustratingly - doesn't awaken. 

 

Upset - guilt - and not  _anger_ , just a fruitless  _desire_  to be angry, so that all that's left behind is a parched sensation, someone else's thoughts and emotions wandering a featureless desert, no destination in mind and none to be had. With gritted teeth, Rey throws up her mental walls, and the presence behind her right temple winks out. Like she'd raised a hand to the sky and crushed the light of a distant star in her fist.

 

Blocked out, but still very much there.

 

* * *

 

Shirt. Cloak. Boots. The engine grease stains on  her knees and biceps and hands will have to stay put for now. Satchel. Blaster. Commlink. If the Force is being kind today, Chewie will be awake, wherever he's got the Falcon parked now. Martl - her now  _ex_ -employer, as of about ten seconds ago - will find "Kira's" little metal hovel empty. He'll have to scrounge up a new mechanic himself.

 

She's moving too slow. Even with her walls up, there's that prickling over every last inch of her skin. Probably the way a planet feels when an asteroid comes hurtling straight at it from the blackness of space.

 

The very same instinct that had guided her into a First Order hangar at Kylo Ren's feet will draw him straight to her - with  _extra_  speed, now that the Bond has given him a lock on her Force signature. Months and months of practice have sharpened both their senses, have made him quicker on the uptake. The lightyears between them are shrinking into kilometers, mattering barely as much.

 

And Rey - Rey is burning with guilt. She's boiling in it. She scrambles up and out of her metal shell of a hideout and bursts out into a red and dusty dawn like a rat from a sewer. The second her boots hit the street, she's sprinting.

 

In a roar of wind that chills the sweat on her back and whining engines that make her teeth ring, half a dozen First Order vessels are coming in for a hasty landing just beyond the edge of the desert town's border. As it is, bramble roof shingles go flying, a shockwave of dust swells high and then tears through every street and building, people scream in equal parts fury and terror.

 

Rey is guilty because she wheezes out her SOS and her coordinates to Chewie and she coughs on dust and a part of her still hasn't left her little metal room. Her pumping legs break her out past the huddled circle of ramshackle buildings and there's a pitch black ship of all angles and folding parts off to her left, entry ramp lowering. She only catches the briefest and most piercing glimpse of the hulking figure clad all in black moving to jump down to the planet's surface in impatience - because Rey's hand whips up and and her Force-push blasts him and the white-armored squadron behind him back into the depths of the ship. Dark cloak tangling, legs flailing, end over end, then nothing.

 

Rey is guilty because her heart pounds her lightheaded. There's the Falcon winking into existence high above, freshly spat out of hyperspace, tilted toward the planet's surface and streaking straight for her. She's guilty because there's still the taste of sand in her mouth and the touch of steel under the pads of her fingers and blistering heat scalding her scalp between the roots of her hair, and she longs only for flowers and grass and a wry barely-there smile under her lips, where a cool breeze ruffles her hair and the future is already done and decided, where her world is soft and secret and Kylo Ren is only Ben Solo and she is who she could have been if only -

 

If.

 

Chewie's familiar smell is in her nose and he's got an enormous furry arm around her when Kylo Ren hurls himself against her defenses, tasting a little too sharply of desperation. Grimly, she thickens those mental shields. Bitterly, he's a fool in her mind. Here he is trying to force himself closer, when it's him she has no choice but to go to every night, when the Force is still trying to shove them together like the like ends of two powerful magnets. Two equal fools.

 

Rey throws herself into the pilot's chair. "Punch it!"

 

They go black. They burn sky. Starlines fill the viewport like a gasp caught in slow motion and smeared across the quartz glass. She catches the searing end of anguish, like she's stuck her open palm on the hull of an engine just barely powered down, and then he's gone. The lightyears stretch between them. The distance manages to make itself matter just a little more this time.

 

* * *

 

Like how she's stopped wondering about the point of that repeated dream, Rey's stopped wondering why Kylo Ren insists on the chase. Their future is clearly no longer the one she'd glimpsed at their brush of hands, microscopic ravines in their fingertips somehow translating through the Force and catching on one another due to his trembling. Kylo will follow her across the galaxy and beyond if he has to, he will let her lead him farther and farther away from the Resistance until the First Order falls to the dust in his wake. She will spread intel as she goes, gather allies along the way, and he will not care in the slightest. 

 

She wonders how long it'll take that Hux to slit his throat.  _Something_  - something  _possessive_  - flares in her at the thought, but she pushes it down.

 

"Give it up," she'd told him once, when his consciousness had found her at the edge of the Hapes Cluster and elbows-deep in the guts of an old AgriCorps freighter. "Surely you've got better things to do."

 

_"I swore to destroy you."_

 

"Sitting on your throne, knitting yourself a pair of slippers comes to mind."

 

 _"_ Why _did you leave?"_

 

"I recommend pink. It's the new black."

 

It never works, those responses of hers. Instead of working himself into an angry froth, his thoughts twist around each other oddly, as though trying to shield themselves from her scrutiny. He'd still fired a laser cannon at her fleeing form that particular day, leaving a small crater in the dirt and the hem of her tunic smoking. She'd thought she  _felt_  him smirking.

 

Like him, she forgets the war sometimes. Like him, her loneliness manifests in the strangest of ways. At least, that's what she tells herself it is.

 

She longs for the moment she slips off to sleep more and more each day. For the world he took from her, the world where nothing went wrong.

 

* * *

 

 A bare, pale hand catches her wrist in a stern grip.

 

"I'm not going to  _hurt_  you," Rey snorts, smiling, and that's how she knows exactly where she is.

 

The dream only ever starts out one way. By the time those first words have left her mouth, dream-Rey is no longer on her subconsciousness' autopilot - she can do as she pleases.

 

For the umpteenth time, she stays sitting just where she is.

 

"Really," someone murmurs. And she's looking down into a pale face touched rosy in places by the sun, dark beauty spots scattered over throat and neck and cheeks and forehead. The Supreme Leader of the New Galactic Republic is arranged neatly on his back in a bed of jewel-green grass and flowers that shiver in the breeze, his head a comfortable weight in her lap, his dark curls pillowed on her thigh.

 

His eyes slit open lazily, dark and shining between curved rows of sooty lashes. "You and my face don't have the most stellar track record," he rumbles, voice caught in his chest halfway to slumber. He doesn't drawl - there's forever the strangest undercurrent of politeness whenever he speaks to her, evidence of an old refinement buried somewhere down deep. "I'm cautious."

 

 _You're an idiot,_  is dream-Rey's typical script, so fond, her lips stretching wider into a grin that shows her teeth. If Rey sits passively, this is how the dream always plays out. If not -

 

"When I kill you," she tells him calmly, because that's the only track they could be on, isn't it, "I'm going to shave your stupid head, and then I'm going to make you look me in the eyes when I do it."

 

She lets her body follow the script. So her fingertips trace the path of the scar that bisects his face, a rough, narrow line scratching against her skin. Forehead, eyebrow, hollow of the eye, cheek, jaw, neck. Tenderness that coils tight in her gut.

 

Kylo's face goes slack under her touch, blissful. His breath puffs unevenly out of him in something bordering on a whine. Not reacting to her words in the slightest. No matter what, he always waits for her to finish what she has to say. The  _real_  Kylo wouldn't have been interested enough for waiting, she's certain.

 

"I could do it with your own lightsaber. We both know it'll obey me." Finished with the scar, her fingers move to his plush lips. Soft and warm to the touch. Despite herself, her own breath catches. "We could even have a fight to the finish, if you want. I'll win."

 

Kylo's lips quirk under her touch. She lingers on the haughty pout of the lower one and is suddenly chewing her own without thinking. "And why is that?" he asks her.

 

That's an answer to the script, of course. The  _you're an idiot_ bit. "Because I'm stronger than you, even if you're better than me," she says.

 

Kylo does something with his jaw, like he's biting the inside of his cheek. Maybe it really  _would_  kill him to smile. Instead, he lifts a hand and cups the nape of her neck, urging her head down closer to his, and her insides liquefy at lethal temperatures. Their noses brush - her lips tingle, her breath stutters against his face - and his lashes flutter, head tipping back harder into her thigh, angling his mouth up closer to hers. Offering himself up for the taking.

 

Near the beginning, she'd stopped him once. A hand on his chest, levering herself up and away in a fit of disgust. Even then, she hadn't so much as been able to strike him.

 

Only, he'd  _stopped_  - immediately, completely. His hand had fallen away from her neck; he'd rested it on his own stomach instead. Looking up calmly into her eyes, he'd continued on with the script as though nothing at all had happened. And something about it had kept her from ever stopping him again.

 

It's a marked improvement on her pseudo-solitary existence, on the permanent run in the real world. A strange sort of relief.

 

So their lips meet slowly. A leisurely, gentle kiss that carries the weight of worlds, like they have all the time the galaxy has to offer but it'll still never be enough, if the way Kylo's fingers brush shakily through her hair and then hold her jaw firmly in place is anything to go by. 

 

Rey has kissed Kylo Ren so many times, she's forgotten whether or not kissing had played any part in that brief vision in the hut on Acht-To a lifetime ago. She'd wager not - just this grassy, sunlit hill and this familiar warmth between them had been enough to knock the air out of her lungs. Proof of a future where everything had changed. Where they had taken the same side.

 

The  _right_  side.

 

It's the kiss that's convinced her that Kylo had seen this place as well. It's far from proof. She just  _knows_ all the same.

 

Only, if his interpretation is to be believed, they must have been sprawled across an obsidian throne and dressed in the finest reds and blacks. Not resting on a hill of wildflowers, wearing soft gray robes edged with ivory. Bitterness pierces her heart and she kisses Kylo harder, as natural a thing to her now as raising her voice mid-argument. Kylo rallies to her unspoken demand and holds her face in both hands in response, and the dream is so vivid, his palms actually smell earthy. His saber calluses scrape her cheeks gently.

 

Rey shows restraint today. She'd once unloaded everything she could manage without flying apart herself, falling upon him in a furious whirlwind of teeth and tongue and grasping hands. And Kylo had shushed her with a hand pressed to her collar, lips to her brow, perhaps knowing that opening his mouth would only make things worse. And she'd spent the better part of that dream angrily swallowing down her sobs against his robes, despising every breath he took. And clinging to him all the same.

 

He'd returned to the old script eventually. And panted every word into her shoulder, like she'd left him with no hope of recovery.

 

Rey pulls back, only for Kylo to stretch up just enough to touch his mouth to hers once more. The timing of it catches her off-guard every time, and her mouth is slightly open, he takes advantage by catching her lower lip between his and the taste of him suddenly floods her tongue. The softest, quickest of kisses - he settles back down in her lap, satisfied. Everything below Rey's neck has left the world of solid matter behind, melting against him where they touch.

 

Dream-Kylo is a problem. So is the real Kylo, but that's a problem Rey knows how to fix.

 

"There's an orphanage in the Vagadarr System," Kylo says, as suddenly as ever. His eyes drift closed, but there's a permanent crease of worry between them that betrays traces of the current Kylo Rey knows all too well. "Full of force-sensitives. If it could be prevailed upon you to join me."

 

"What were you thinking?" Rey whispers to him. "If this is at all like what you saw, why did you throw it all away?"

 

Kylo opens his eyes just long enough to roll them. "Fine. You do the talking."

 

She'd used to have nightmares of the day her parents had left her. Screaming their names while they walked away unflinchingly, as though they couldn't hear her.

 

It feels like that sometimes. Leave it to a dream to seem just as obstinate as the real thing.

 

What would happen if she threw him off her lap? If she stood and fled for the first time? If her fingers that idly stroke his face turned to claws to scratch and maim?

 

She could do it.  _This_  time, she could.

 

She's taken too long to continue the conversation. Kylo snatches her wrist again, this time much more softly, and brings it to his lips with his eyes still closed.  _Now_  there's something shy about the way he presses his lips to her palm, the underside of her wrist, something awkward about the way he tests the bone very gently with his teeth, adding an anxious edge to the laziness of the action. Rey is left weak and speechless anyway, the rug torn out from underneath her anger. His lashes scrape a line across her knuckles.

 

"I don't understand you," she admits, hollow. The words burn her tongue. "I don't understand  _any_  of this."

 

"The Falcon's garbage. We'll leave it with Chewie. I'd prefer not to die horribly in the vacuum of space."

 

"All those kids are probably dead by now. Or in your stupid Stormtrooper training program. We could've taught them the ways of the Force."

 

"Don't forget - the queen of Naboo still wants a word. In person. She probably still wants me to suffer a painfully specific death, but leave  _that_  talking to me, anyway."

 

"Naboo  _burned_  two cycles ago!" Rey clenches her fists. She's going to throw him off. And then, quite possibly, beat him bloody, for all the good it'll do. If she can't safely get her hands on the real one, then she can take it out on the dream version instead. 

 

It's so quick, she almost misses it. The briefest flash of teeth. "Anything you say, sweetheart."

 

And tomorrow, she'll be kissing him again, Kylo-who-isn't-Kylo - or maybe she's got it the wrong way 'round after all - right here on this sunlit hill in the middle of who-knows-where. She'll be hanging onto every moment just like she always does, carrying their memory whether she likes it or not back into a galaxy where worlds are still burning and her friends are so far away and time seems to drag itself forward on its elbows despite it all.

 

There isn't much time left in the dream. It'll run out of energy within the next couple of immaculately-delivered lines from Kylo, and then she'll either drift into another dream or float to wakefulness. So in a burst of desperation, the words come.

 

"You know what I wanted, that day?" she demands. Kylo says nothing, waiting like a perfectly programmed protocol droid in her lap. It feels good - like he's at her mercy. "I just wanted peace." That sounds empty. "I wanted all the death to stop." True enough, but not quite there. "I wanted it all to be  _over_." Now she's angry. Now that painfully brief dream is unfurling in her mind's eye, where the entire First Order cowered before the combined might of Ben and Rey, standing firm between an army and the wounded Resistance. 

 

And afterward -

 

 _That_  afterward? Who really knows for sure?  _This_  is their afterward now. Their wild chase to the edge of it all.

 

"How could you?" she whispers. Her nose is prickling threateningly, and as Kylo watches, she takes hold of his jaw in one hand and forces him to look her in the eyes. "How could you give all that up -  _all of that_  - for a  _throne_? For more death, and -" Her fury is rising too fast for her words to keep up. She chokes on it. " _Kriff_. I just wanted -"

 

Fingers brush her cheek. Her throat.

 

 _I'm not crying_ , she wants to snap at him. But it's just the script. Merely a dream.

 

"What did  _you_  want?" she asks him, weary.

 

He gets a look on his face that she likes every time. Like he's stuck halfway between pain and exultation. The same look he'd had on his face when he'd stared at Snoke's newly empty throne and the room had burned itself to ashes all around them. Only this time -

 

"Rey," he says, hoarse.

 

A part of her - a part of her that had been crouched and waiting, knowing  _exactly_  what she was about to do -  _crashes_  awake all the same, debris in smithereens all around them. Her trembling hand strokes his forehead, pushing his curls up off his face - she rakes her fingers through his dark locks, nails gently scraping his scalp, and the emperor's spine arches the crown of his head into her hand, squirming further into her touch like wet clay at the potter's wheel. He barely bites back a groan - she feels it, her free hand lightly caressing his throat.

 

"Stars," she says quietly. "You're  _such_  a jerk."

 

Rey's always been good at sticking to what she knows - then making it work from there. She bends down and crushes her mouth to his.

 

Not that she's ever done  _this_  before in any of these dreams. But Kylo is merely programmed in - he doesn't seem to mind.

 

His response is like a counterattack, immediate and inexplicably fierce. Rey is breathless and valiantly trying to keep up within seconds, meeting each purposeful, determined drag of his lips over hers with pressure of her own, refusing to be overwhelmed. But this Kylo is kissing her like there's something at  _stake_ , like it's  _personal_  - he tenses and gathers his weight under him and though her hands grip his shoulders and try to hold him down, he sits up, the familiar weight vanishing from her lap at last, only to be replaced by Kylo's arms around her waist pulling her across the grass tight against him and his mouth tearing from hers.

 

"We could make it like old times," Kylo rasps, his breath all but gone. Funny, but she can't quite remember the script at the moment, the context of what he's saying utterly escaping her. She can only grasp handfuls of his pale gray robes and hold on for dear life while he presses a series of hot, judicious kisses to the line of her jaw. "We'll race. Last one there admits their ship belongs in the junkheap."

 

Right. Yes. This is familiar. Dream-Rey's line surfaces midst the muddle of her thoughts, and she's about to defend the Falcon's honor when Kylo kisses her chin - then kisses it again, closer to her mouth - and makes forming any words at all amazingly difficult.

 

She begins an insult, usually not too tough to do, not when she's in the right frame of mind - "You're such a -" only for his lips to crash down on hers and steal the rest of it away, her arms wrapping hungrily around his neck before she knows what she's doing, closer, more. " _Kylo_  -"

 

It strikes her, as though from a great distance off, that around here is about as far as the dream ever goes.

 

"All that time you ran from me," Kylo mumbles against her lips, "I was sure that piece of junk was going to collapse into a pile of nuts and bolts." He kisses her stunned mouth once. "And I would have to fish you out of space. Turns out it was the other way around."

 

Rey's mind is racing.

 

"When?" she demands, just barely dodging his questing mouth. Suddenly she's curling the neck of his robes into her urgent fists. "Kylo -  _Ben_  - before the throne room? When did I  _run_  -"

 

"No," he grunts, in response to something she has never said. Now he is sullen, familiar. "I never would've caught you. No matter how close I came, after Crait, you were too quick, every time."

 

The realization rips through her at the speed of light. " _Ben_  -"

 

And just as quickly, she's waking with a wild gasp, the Falcon humming rickety and familiar all around her. Rey covers her burning mouth with a shaking hand.

 

* * *

 

Somewhere lightyears away, Kylo Ren struggles to breathe, one hand fisted in his pillow above his head, eyes wide and staring in the dark. Even now, he can still feel her, and he can still taste the words that his dream had never before led him to say.

 

In his mind, she gasps his name. She faces him from across cities and wastelands, her metal staff crackling with lightning so she burns like a forever-fracturing star.

 

 _Let her run_ , he decides when his heart and lungs have both started working again, strangely elated. Somewhere out there, there's a future still up for grabs.


End file.
